This entry examines our possibilities for unmaking the Taylorist dreamworlds of labor/robotics that sustain the informatics of domination, in favor of more unexpected encounters and more equitable modes of livelihood. The relation labor/robotics, manufactured in the nineteenth century through regulations of time, space, bodies, and machines, has never been fully contained by its scientifically managed enclosures. Luddite resistances and the lively contingency of the inventive work required to keep the machinery working, however repressed, continue to kick back. Yet the networked infrastructures of the postindustrial service economy have concentrated relations of labor/robotics on a grander scale, from the electronic sweatshops of the Apple supply chain to the obligatory distribution points of the Amazon warehouse. Each new opening requires a new form of enclosure, the re-creation of a closed-enough world—discursively, imaginatively, materially, and practically—to enable the mythical autonomy of robotic servitude.
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